“Yeah, similar moral. Don’t talk about people behind their backs but even more important don’t trust those filthy foreign deities from up north.” I lost my smile. “Last time I saw Ebisu’s Eavesdrop, I was still a kid. It came off the sea at the eastern end of Newpest and ripped the inland settlements apart for kilometres along the Expanse shoreline. Killed a hundred people without even trying. It drowned half the weed freighters in the inland harbour before anyone could power them up. The wind picked up the lightweight skimmers and threw them down the streets as far as Harlan Park. Round here, the Eavesdrop is very bad luck.”

“Well yeah, for anyone walking their dog in Harlan Park, it would have been.”

“I’m serious Tod. If this storm does come in and your methed-out pal Vlad can’t handle his helm, we’re likely to find ourselves upside down and trying to breathe belaweed before we get anywhere near Segesvar’s place.”

Murakami frowned a little.

“Let me worry about Vlad,” he said. “You just concentrate on building us an assault plan that works.”

I nodded.

“Right. An assault plan that works on the premier haiduci stronghold in the southern hemisphere, using teenage junkies for shock troops, and a hookback storm for landing cover. By dawn. Sure. How hard can it be?”

The frown again for a moment, then, suddenly, he laughed.

“Now you put it like that, I can hardly wait.” He clapped me on the shoulder and wandered off towards the pirate hoverloader, voice trailing back to me. “I’ll go talk to Vlad now. Going to be one for the annals, Tak. You’ll see. I’ve got a feeling about it. Envoy intuition.”

“Right.”

And out at the horizon, thunder rolled back and forth as if trapped in the narrow space between the cloud base and the ground.

Ebisu, back for his trident, and not much liking what he’d just heard.

FORTY-FIVE

Dawn was still little more than a rinsed-out grey splash thrown over the looming black mass of the stormfront when Impaler cast off her moorings and blasted out across the Expanse. At assault speed, she made a noise as if she were shaking herself to pieces, but as we headed into the storm even that faded before the shriek of the wind and the metallic drumming of rain on her armoured flanks. The forward viewports of the bridge were a shattering mass of water through which heavy-duty wipers flogged with an overworked electronic whining. Dimly, you could see the normally sluggish waters of the Expanse whipped into waves. Ebisu’s Eavesdrop had delivered to expectations.